In container treatment apparatuses, e.g. in connection with bottle filling devices, the so-called neck handling is normally used, which means that each bottle is held by a conveyor element, e.g. a clamp gripper, on an annular flange formed on the bottle neck, while it is being conveyed through or to stations. In addition, the so-called base handling is common practice, which means that each bottle is conveyed in an upright position, e.g. on a conveyor belt, and may even be held at the bottom.
In the case of containers that are not capable of standing upright, it is known to convey each container with a so-called carrier which comprises a base standing on the conveyor surface of a conveyor path and which is conveyed in a free-standing condition (EP-A-0 222 175). The carrier is configured as a kind of adapter, which is adapted to the conveyor path on the outer side thereof and to the greatest possible variety of different containers on the inner side thereof. The known carrier is open at the top so that the container can be inserted from above and removed upwards, and it is provided with retaining means on the base which engage at a downward area of the container and support the latter in the carrier during transport. The sides of the base constituting the front and rear sides when seen in the direction of transport have similar convex curvatures so that, when the carriers are transported one behind the other, they will butt against one another. The insertion and the removal of each container necessitates complicated lowering and lifting movements with possibly exact positioning on the sides, which will require additional space and an additional investment in control technology. Furthermore, the carrier is only adapted to a limited number of differently configured containers, so that in a container treatment apparatus in which the containers to be selectively conveyed are very different, it is necessary to use a corresponding number of different carriers or at least carrier inserts, and so that, when a changeover to other containers takes place, time-consuming retrofitting operations will also be required for the carriers. In view of the fact that a large number of carriers is often required on the conveyor path, these changeover times add up to undesirably long downtimes of the container treatment apparatus. When neck handling or some other kind of handling with only horizontal relative movements between the containers and the conveying elements moving the containers within the stations is carried out in the stations interconnected by the conveyor path, communication between the stations and the conveyor path is difficult, since the known carrier additionally necessitates, for loading and unloading, lifting and lowering movements for which control units may perhaps not be available in the stations themselves. Communication then requires a high investment in construction and control technology because of the carriers.